


to sleep, perchance

by Nimravidae



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale POV, Barely E, M/M, Soft NESS, There's some fucking but it's mostly just reminiscent, really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:42:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24455380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: Aziraphale considers the nature of sleeping and waking and how it feels to be in love.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 97
Collections: To The World - Good Omens Anniversary Exchange





	to sleep, perchance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ryoukon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryoukon/gifts).



> Barely reaches the cut-off for explicit, I think I forgot how to write porn. 
> 
> Again, it's reminiscent nonsense on how it feel to be in love.

In order to wake, you must first sleep. 

Caught somewhere in the nebulous waves of nothingness, floating between _here_ and _there_ before being snatched from the blissful underbelly of quiet and wrenched back onto the firm groundings of reality. To sleep invites vulnerability, to let your mind wander free from the _could_ and the _should_ and the _no we mustn't_ and the _but if they find out_ and the _we can never we can never we can never so please stop testing the edges of my self-control like this._

Sleeping means exposing yourself to the sort of truth that fever-burns in the back of your throat and curls like the snakes you don’t dare think of. Sleeping means laying those secret-soft parts of yourself open and open to your own examinations, to your own waking mind. The places you’d rather no one looked, the spaces inside of you that overflow with red and liquid gold. 

To give yourself space to remember the things you’d rather forget. Six thousand years of self-negotiation and logic and rationalization. Six thousand years of looking up at a star-pocked night and wondering if sleep would wash away the memories of bloodstench and fear and salt, if sleep could be the river to wash away the sins of obedience. 

To sleep is to lay bare, to shudder yourself open, to pull at the threads that wrench your seams together until you’ve become entirely unfurled and there is nothing but your secrets and your shame spreading out like blood across the bomb-black floor of a church, dusted with the ash remains of Heaven and the ghosts of a flash-red explosion. 

Aziraphale has never slept before. That is not to say he has never awoken. 

He had never been certain what it feels like, waking up after a long sleep, but it couldn’t be much different from the sensation that washed over him the moment his fingers brushed Crowley’s over a handle of a bag of salvaged books. A sensation of being unearthed, of light hitting and bending and refracting around things in strange new ways. 

Of knowing that he had been asleep for almost six thousand years and wishing that he hadn’t. ( _Wishing is not praying. He doesn’t pray anymore—he used to pray. He didn’t pray in that bombed-out church with his heart tucking up under his tongue and pounding against the back of his teeth.)_

He’d beg for Her guidance, for the willpower to drag his eyes from the glass-shatter cut of his jaw, from the line of his throat whenever he tipped his head back to laugh. Praying to stop thinking about what it would be like to press his lips against the line of it, to find the place where his pulse should be.

How many times did his prayers turn themselves inside out? How many times was it no longer Lord please give me the strength to resist and instead his throat worked around Crowley’s name, swallowing him down into the depths of himself. He thought it was just closeness, it was just the nearness of their selves. It was just the nature of the thing, a flashbang attraction. Natural.

Being awake means being cognizant, being aware now of the places where Crowley is. How close is his body to Aziraphale’s? How close are his legs, the collection of angles and sharp edges and points that always seem to gravitate towards him—the nearness of his hands, of the bone-sharp fingers that fan and spread and twist with every work. The way he holds a wine glass, stem slotted between his two fingers, 

The tilt of his jaw, the shape of his ear, what it would feel like to trace the shell with his fingers, his tongue. _Don’t get too close to me, please, you know what I smell like - I know you do, I know what you smell like. Whiskey and cigarettes and the edges of summer and the afterburn of a wildfire._

Aziraphale first awoke, he would say, a few months after the world didn’t end. The first time he discovered what whiskey tasted like off Crowley’s tongue. 

It had been in the bookshop, as moments like that often were. Aziraphale would like to claim he had perfect recollection of it. He would like to claim that he remembered everything, the way the lamp-light caught Crowley’s jawbone, cutting ruthless shadows across his skin. The way he smelled, the way his throat bobbed under the choke of anxiety.

But all of it was too wrapped up in the feeling of his heart under his tongue and then in lips against his own. Crowley kissed him like he was something delicate. Like he was something important. 

He kissed him like he held the knowledge of the world in the space between their lips. 

There was a natural progression to these things. Kissing led to touching and touching led to more kissing and more kissing led to other things.

And other things.

And other things. 

Aziraphale didn’t think they spent a breath without skin pressed to skin—sweaty and panting—for a few days. Afterall, they had time to make up for. 

And as it would turn out, Aziraphale quite liked those things. He liked being awake, he liked the sensation of Crowley’s hands sweeping down the length of his back, he liked the feeling of lips at his throat, his chest, his stomach, and thighs. He liked what it felt like to be spread out on a blanket on the floor, taken apart piece by piece and consumed. Laid open and exposed like a _feast._

He liked Crowley. He _loved_ Crowley, he had realized with a blink (you can awaken multiple times, can’t you?) somewhere between the hours, Crowley stretched out on his back, the smell of sex clinging to the air. He loved Crowley. 

Looking up at him, his chin on Crowley’s narrow-channel chest, he said it. 

_I love you,_ to the hand settled on the small of his back and the glimmer-gold eyes watching him with all the careful hesitation of a snake in the tall grass. 

Nervousness settled through Crowley, in all his familiar points. The flicker of eyes away from Aziraphale, the bob of his throat, the shudder of his chest down to the fidgeting of his fingers and the shifting of his knees. 

_I love you too, angel. I always have._

Adjustment came afterwards—not unwelcome, but different. New in the sense that things are often new. Crowley had always stalked the shadows of the bookshop, but now it was different. It was different when Aziraphale left blankets draped over the uncomfortable sofa in Crowley’s living room, it was different when they didn’t disappear-reappear folded over the back of his own back at the shop without so much as a blink.

It was different to lie there, naked between sheets, watching Crowley breathe through the night, knowing full well he didn’t _need_ to do such a thing. He was cognizant, constantly, of the closeness of them, but in a new way. No longer was it the thriving need to keep proper distance, to be aware of all moments of how close he was—now it was in desperate, near-blinding craving to be closer. To be touching some part of Crowley at all times. 

Aziraphale wanted, he _needed,_ to be touching him. His skin burned for it, it ached and _craved_ to be touching Crowley in the way it hadn’t done either of those things for anything before. He let himself indulge, even. He left himself cave and yield and reach out as Crowley slithered past him to squeeze the point of his elbow. He let himself brush his fingers across the rise of his hip, all wrapped up in too-tight denim. 

He wasn’t sure when, but he was fairly certain he expected to stop. He expected to fall out of himself and wake up in the dead of night (that’s what happened to humans, right? They get what they want and the wake up, tangled in sweaty sheets and panting and alone). He expected to bolt upright from sleep he didn’t know he was lost in, from a dream where Crowely would happily push books back onto his shelves in the most disordered and chaotic of fashions—pleased as punch to be causing trouble for anyone who might come sniffing trying to find a title. 

Where Aziraphale could slide up behind him, lips dropped to the back of Crowley’s neck and the side of his temple—just under that twisting scar-mark. 

“Angel,” he’d croon, pushing back into the hands settled on his hips—Aziraphale’s hands, Aziraphale’s hands which have now long-memorized the feeling of Crowley’s jeans beneath his touch, that have now long-memorized the way his skin folded around the broken-edged cut of his hips. 

Surely he’d wake up soon, right? When he let his hands slide around Crowley, one splayed on the top of his thigh, the other untucking the front of his shirt. “Yes, my dear boy?”

“You’re getting awfully handsy for someone who says _not where the books can see.”_

He would wake up soon, right? What do the books care? Months of this, months of touching and kissing and _fucking_ and Aziraphale hasn’t woken up yet. Surely it was coming, surely it must be soon. His nose skated along the delicate line of Crowley’s throat, his back shuddering against Aziraphale’s front. 

“We don’t need to be here,” he said, voice half-familiar to himself. “We can go back to—”

Aziraphale didn’t have time to finish the sentiment, hardly time to _blink_ before the lights around him changed. The warmth of the bookshop bled away to a preternatural coolness—all sharp shadows and greyscale bleakness. “Really?”

“Not where the books can see, you said.”

He leaned back, just a fraction, one hand still teasing at the rucked-up bottom of Crowley’s shirt. He’d taken them, at least, to Crowley’s bedroom, to the unyieldingly brutalist architecture—the hard walls and the clear-cut corners.

Once upon a time, it had been off-putting. It had made something uncomfortable crawl under Aziraphale’s skin and settle in the nooks and crannies of his chest. Everything was dark, it was dreary and lightless and unfamiliar. Aziraphale would lie awake (as if he hadn’t been sleeping, as if he wasn’t awake) and count all the places he felt like there should have been lamps. All the places with lightless corners and lifeless shadows.

It used to be discomforting. 

Used to be. 

The longer he was there, the more time he spent in Crowley’s Mayfair flat, peeling him out of jeans and shirts and laying the pale expanse of him flat against the slab of his bed—the more time he spent following the run and the corners and the sharp-edged shadows that buried themselves in the crux of Crowley’s bones—the more he traced them with the flat of his tongue the more he realized it was only him. 

The shadows, the edges, the corners, the darkness and the greyscale. 

It was just Crowley. A reflection of himself cut apart and pasted onto the walls, right beside Leonardo’s work and above the statues. 

When the realize came, it wasn’t hard to fall in love with it too. 

He laid there, for a moment, hands settled on Crowley’s hips as he worked himself down in his lap—the heat of him near-blinding as Crowley gasped and clenched around Aziraphale’s cock—and looked at him. 

Really _looked_ at him. His head thrown back, his fingers clawing at the sheets as he worked his hips in slow, burning, circles. If Aziraphale blinked, there was more of him, if he blinked there was less. Blink again and there’s the edges of his Essence, leaking out around them and curling and whispering at the edges of his vision.

Another flicker of his eyes and the shadow of Crowley’s wings twitch against the veil between _here_ and _there,_ framing his skinny body and narrow shoulders. 

“Fuck, Aziraphale,” Crowley groaned, grinding his hips down against Aziraphales—wrenching an unbidden groan from the back of his tongue.

“Dear,” it came wrecked—it came ruined. He reached for Crowley’s cock, flushed and leaking a sticky puddle onto Aziraphale’s belly. “Come on now, love.”

He always wondered if this would be the moment he woke. With Crowley’s voice wrecked and shattered above him, with the throat-wrecking squeeze of Crowley’s body around him as he came in long, shuddering, waves. With the ripple of pleasure that shimmered through the air and sparked half-familiar half-holy energy somewhere in the middle-distance of the world. 

If this would be what burned him awake. 

If he would come to with sticky pants in the middle of sweaty sheets. 

Hips bucking up of their own accord, chasing the blinding, sweat-slick pleasure, he did not wake when his own wave (half-holy, half-human), raced through him and flooded into Crowley. He did not wake when he pulled him down, sharp-edges softening in the hold of his arms. 

“Shit,” Crowley gasped, limbs tangled and desperate. “S’good, isn’t it, angel?”

Good. It was more than good. 

Fingers slot through burning hair, angling Crowley’s face up for another long kiss. In the clear-blue moments like that, with Crowley’s yawn stifled into his shoulder and Aziraphale’s lips lingering down the line of his cheek—he thought, not for the first time, that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t asleep.

Maybe there wasn’t anything else to wake up from. 


End file.
